The Economist (20210515) by calibre

Author:calibre
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, pdf
Tags: news, The Economist
Publisher: calibre
Published: 2021-05-15T03:13:21+00:00

Mr Ilchovsky’s allegations could hardly be more damning. The economy is controlled by men close to Mr Borisov and ministers are just “puppets”, he said. He claimed that the biggest power in agriculture was Ivan “the chicken” Angelov, and that he had been forced to sell chicken feed to Mr Angelov’s company at low prices. Mr Ilchovsky submitted false invoices to inflate the turnover of the company Mr Angelov owns with his brother in order to boost its value when it was launched on the stock exchange in 2018. Every agricultural producer or importer who did not do what was demanded of them was persecuted by the food-standards agency, which held up imports on the border or paralysed businesses with exacting health inspections.

Mr Borisov has denied all the claims and says he has never even met Mr Ilchovsky. Mr Angelov says that 95% of what Mr Ilchovsky says is untrue. On May 10th, however, Pavel Stoimenov, another businessman, made more, similarly damning allegations to the committee. He said he had “delivered” 1,000 votes to Mr Borisov’s party, but when he had tried to resist Mr Angelov’s demands, buildings belonging to his company had been set on fire.

Mr Ilchovsky said he complied because it was a “survival strategy”. “There is not a single EU-funded project in the agricultural sector where prices have not been jacked up or some fraud has not happened,” he added. The allegations are being sent to the EU public prosecutor’s office, not just Bulgaria’s, which is widely believed to be subject to political influence.

Everything the two witnesses claim, says Ognyan Georgiev, the economics editor of Kapital, a leading business daily, has long been rumoured, and Mr Borisov has survived scandals before. But public remarks by a former insider are “a very heavy blow. He was basically describing in ominous detail how our captured state works.”

Atanas Tchobanov, a founder of Bivol, an investigative news site, says Mr Borisov’s fall will take time, since his party is embedded in all institutions, including the prosecution service. But now, he says, a window of opportunity has opened. Mr Tchobanov is optimistic that the caretaker government will approve freedom-of-information requests he is about to submit about all sorts of sensitive questions. “It might be the tipping point,” he grins. ■

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